In the course of a life, if you’re very lucky, you run into people who through their words and deeds launch you on a completely new and better trajectory than the one you arrived on. There’s actually quite a bit more than luck involved, of course; one of my favorite definitions of “privilege” glosses it as a state in which your personal networks tend to help you achieve your ambitions, rather than suppressing or undermining them. But there’s unquestionably room in all of this for the operations of chance.

Looking back now, I can see a few clear and obvious inflection points in the journey that resulted in me being able to write and publish Radical Technologies, and without exception they were moments at which a specific individual human being intervened in my life in a conscious attempt to change my fortunes for the better. And what strikes me with particular force is how contingent all of these encounters were. They so easily could have gone another way — any other way. And had that been the case, it is overwhelmingly likely that my life as I know it wouldn’t exist.

What follows, then, is my (no doubt flawed and incomplete) attempt to name and thank these human beings for making the decisions they did. I want them, and you, to know that wonderful things happened in the aftermath of those choices.

Juliana Uruburu, Dwight Jackson, Dave Dunn, Tori Orr, Anne Galloway, Christina Wodtke, Jeffrey Zeldman, Andrew Otwell and Chris Heathcote: thank you for seeing what nobody else could, and for acting on what you thought you saw. You all have my profound and permanent gratitude. Adriana Young and Leo Hollis, of course, I’ve already thanked in the book itself. Maya Lin extended to me, at a critical moment, a gesture of big-sisterly kindness that she will have long ago forgotten, but which meant everything to me. And a few other people along the way, sadly no longer with us, who said or did things that changed the entire course of my existence. (Here I’m thinking primarily of Herbert Muschamp, who I miss all the time, and the great Red Burns at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, who took a gamble on letting me teach there when there was no obvious reason to do so. May their memory be a blessing.)

The other night I selected-all in a file on Google Docs and turned the entire text bright red. This was my signal to my editor Leo that I’d made the final round of edits on the last outstanding chapter I owed him. And this, in turn, means that after eight years and eleven months, I’m finally done with the project I started in this blog post. I’ve finished my book.

It is, in too many ways to count, a different book from the one I set out to write. I owe most of this to Leo, actually. Do you know the scene in Inception where Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy, as intruders in the virtual world of another man’s mind, are under assault by the ghostly brigades of their subject’s “militarized subconscious”? Gordon-Levitt’s character is standing at the door of a warehouse, plinking away ineffectually at the encroaching horde with an assault rifle, when Hardy shoulders him aside. With the words, “You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling,” he hoists a massive South African grenade launcher, lobs a round onto the opposite rooftop, and blows things up reeeeal good.

That was Leo. I came to him with a book about cities and technology — a book that had been dangling out in public for six years at that point, a book I’d already published a quarter of — and two chapters into our work on it, he pulled a Hardy on me, in the biggest possible way. “I don’t think you’re writing a book about cities anymore,” he told me, over stand-up espressos beneath the awning of the Algerian Coffee Stores, as drizzle dampened the greasy Soho asphalt. “I think you’re writing a book about Everyday Life.”

I could hear the capital letters, and knew immediately (as my bowels turned to ice) that he was invoking the whole tradition of thought that starts in Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre. Which is to say that he wasn’t simply asking me to paint on a bigger canvas, though he was definitely doing that. He was demanding that I take myself and my work seriously, and understand that what I was writing might someday find its place on a shelf alongside people who had actually contributed to Western thought and culture. (In Lefebvre’s case, rather explosively, given his influence on the events of May ’68.)

It put the zap on my head so hard that I didn’t get any further work done on the book for a good six months.

I don’t know what it’s like for you. I won’t presume to say I understand anyone else’s interiority, or process, or approach to their work. I imagine that there are some creators who are safely armored by a transcendent belief in their own talent, who glide through pitches and contracts and reviews lubricated by a sense of inevitability and rightness. I’m not one of those people.

So in a way, what Leo did to me was cruel. But it also led directly to a change of title, a change of scope, and a much bigger and more ambitious book. What had started out as a rather constrained proposition turned into a sprawling survey of some of the major ways in which networked information technologies shape the choices arrayed before us. I should be clear that it probably misses as much as it gets right; I have a sustained history of focusing too much on the wrong aspects of a technology, or at least not the aspects that turn out to be most salient to our understanding of it, and I’m not sure it’s any different here.

I’m also a little gutted to have written a book that’s so obviously and prominently about information technology. As I’d originally envisioned it, this was supposed to be a decisive pivot away from all of that, and toward the thing I care more deeply about, which is the life of cities. But as Nurri always reminds me, there are any number of writers in the world who have deeper or more original insight into cities. It just isn’t what people seem to want from me. After awhile, if you’re smart, you listen to what the world tells you about what it wants from you, with intense gratitude that it appears to want anything at all.

In its ten chapters, I take up some of the recent and emerging technical developments that now condition the way we experience the everyday, just about everywhere on Earth. I start with the smartphone, ready-to-hand as it is, and continue on to augmented reality; the so-called internet of things; 3D printing, CNC milling and other digital fabrication technologies; cryptocurrency and the technology underlying it, the blockchain; and finally the constellation of practices and ideas that is dedicated to the eclipse of human discretion, and includes machine learning, the automation of work and artificial intelligence. I spend some time considering the ways in which these discrete techniques are brought together in particular ensembles and commercial value propositions — and by whom, and particularly toward what ends — and finish up by asking if there’s a space for tactics or even resistance available to us in any of this. All in all, I think it’s turned out rather well.

Most writers say something along these lines, but it’s really true and I really do mean it: though I take full responsibility for whatever infelicities and misapprehensions remain, just about all the good in this book arises from the conversations I’ve had with you. It’s not — and I’m not — Lefebvre, but that’s OK. It’s not half-bad. I don’t think I’ll ever stop being grateful.

I’m rather fond of the title, by the way. It’s ambitious, a title to conjure with. It has a certain amount of what the Rastafarians used to call Dread. I don’t know if the book I’ve written really deserves a title like that, but I guess you’ll let me know, won’t you?

Thanks to those of you who came along for the ride — especially those who’ve stuck with me all the way from that first blog post, when I was promising you a self-published book called The City Is Here For You To Use, and it was 90% a reaction to the incompetence of my first publisher. Thanks doubly to the 859 of you (!) who ponied up to pre-order that book, most of you in the weeks immediately following the project’s announcement, and who had to wait until the last quarter of 2013 to get your hands on anything resembling the thing you’d ordered. Thanks, eternal thanks, to Leo Hollis, for kicking out the jams. And thanks always to Nurri for sticking with me through all the chicanes and blind alleys of this endless, endless project. Let’s see what happens now.

The following is a very lightly edited version of something I wrote for the newsletter I published on a weekly basis all through 2015. I always understood these pieces as ephemera, and so my policy was that there would be no persistent archive of them, and no way for anyone to read a weekly entry they hadn’t received by virtue of being subscribed to the newsletter at the time it was published. They were strictly of and for the moment.

I still think that was a sound policy. But not a week goes by that someone doesn’t ask me to repost the following, and in the interest of saving everyone some time I figured I’d do so here. For reasons that I cannot fathom, it remains the single most-requested among the sixty-odd newsletters I published last year. Usual disclaimers apply, but I hope you enjoy it.

Many of you will recall that for the two years before we moved to London, I was in the habit of convening drinks every Friday night at Temple Bar on Lafayette Street. This standing get-together, imaginatively dubbed FRIDAYS AT 7, remains one of the best things I’ve ever been involved with. I still derive an enormous amount of satisfaction out of having brought this particular assortment of people together, still glow from the memory of a great many great nights, and to this day try to arrange a FATSEVEN gathering whenever I happen to be in New York City for more than 48 hours or so.

But it also taught me something very deep about the nature of human socialization. You should know that I inherit from my mother a profound tendency to want to please everyone I’m interacting with, at least in certain contexts — even when there are more than two people involved, even when some of those people disagree with or outright dislike one another. Now, this can be a beautiful trait. Buried within it, I’m sure, are the seeds of some future generation’s ability to settle all invidious contentions, bring all parties to a common table and drape the world in universal harmony. But of all the troublesome tendencies in my psychological makeup (and there are a few), this one quality has perhaps caused more chaos in my various relationships and jobs than any other.

Because as it happens, you just can’t give everyone you know everything they want. I’m not necessarily saying that all relationships are brutally zero-sum games of resource management, but, y’know, they take place inside history. Like anything else that does, they’re subject to entropy, scarcity, the rules of physics. That I can see, there are no Pareto-optimal solutions for interpersonal relationships, any more than there are for any other system above a certain threshold of complexity. They’re like a three-body problem. (Sometimes they are a three-body problem.)

It turned out that my dearly beloved FRIDAYS AT 7 crew was like that. Now, I need to do a little bit of stage-setting, so you understand the particular dynamic at play here. Though to a one they were (and are) all fascinating, funny, talented and endearing, not everyone who came to drinks on a regular basis had necessarily tasted success as the world defines it. But there was a subset of folks there who had done so, and by any rational standard these were all accomplished people. They’d published well- and widely-reviewed books, or shown films at world-famous festivals, or played a part in the development of some piece of software you use on a daily basis.

I certainly don’t think any more highly of them because this happens to be the case, because god knows why any of our lives break the way they do. But naturally I admired them for their achievements, as well as for the other things that commended them to my friendship in the first place. And I had assumed that within the social universe of the particularly accomplished, there existed something like a consensus that anyone you might care to name more or less knows what they’re talking about.

And so I’ll confess that it floored me when late one night, on hearing me praise a mutual acquaintance who I myself did consider to be highly accomplished, one of these people said, “I can’t believe you rate that guy. He’s just such total bullshit.” Laboring under my maternal inheritance (which I eventually came to recognize as a mutant strain of Geek Social Fallacy #4, actively operating in both my mother and I decades before it was identified and named as such), it had never occurred to me that some objectively high-achieving people might regard one another in this way.

Yeah, I know. You’d think I would have figured this out on the dewy side of forty, come to some much earlier insight into how contingent and variable human reputation can be. I dunno — maybe I cut class that day. Either way, it wasn’t until that very moment that I realized how acutely uncomfortable my praise of this third party was making my friend. It was clear to me, in fact, that he would begin to question my own judgement if I insisted on proceeding too much further down this path. The conversation would get awkward, then actively difficult, and then who knows? maybe the friendship would too. Doors of perception blasted wide by my third Stolichnaya martini of the evening, I began to wonder how many other times over the years I had put someone in just this uncomfortable position.

I realized on the spot that what I needed was a Master Bullshit Matrix.

The Master Bullshit Matrix, as I saw it in that blinding flash of insight, would take the form of a very large (but mercifully finite) spreadsheet. In its cells would be recorded — would reside for all time — a complete accounting of just who considers whom to be Bullshit. Accomplished or not, celebrated or not, by definition there would be a place for everyone on the Master Bullshit Matrix, and then we’d all finally be able to reckon just where we stood.

On its face, compiling any such thing would certainly appear to be a spectacularly mean-spirited and juvenile thing to do: the kind of effort snotty fourth-graders set themselves to, when deciding who is and is not allowed to sit at their lunch table. But as I imagined it, the point of the Master Bullshit Matrix was letting everyone involved in one of these conflicts of appraisal save a little face.

Armed with the Master Bullshit Matrix, I wouldn’t embarrass myself (or anyone else) by continuing to insist on the quality of someone the person I was talking to considered Bullshit. Not unless I wanted to, anyway. In any given moment, I could decide whether or not I wanted to press the case for someone’s non-Bullshitness, teasingly needle someone by dropping the name of someone I knew full well they thought was Bullshit, or avoid the topic entirely. I could even cross-reference a particular intersection of personalities, and learn whether the Bullshit judgement ran one-way or two-way.

Please do not mistake me to be saying that good conversation requires agreement about everything — that you should ever be insincere yourself, or commit yourself to a position you do not in fact hold, just for the sake of someone’s momentary comfort. But there are clearly times when the greater good of social ease requires the deft avoidance of certain conversational minefields. And as I came to understand so late in life, you enter one of those minefields in arguing for someone’s transcendent genius…when your interlocutor believes that person to be Bullshit.

In an attempt to see what it might take to populate the Master Bullshit Matrix, I gently began to probe certain of my more forthright friends for their opinions. All of them understood the question immediately, offering their own personal Bullshit nominations without hesitation. What I found most interesting was that some of these nominations — many of them, in fact — came to me as a complete surprise. It reinforced my sense that there’s absolutely no predicting ahead of time who is going to strike someone else as Bullshit.

Broadly speaking, what seemed to make someone vulnerable to the charge that they were Bullshit? It’s hard to pin down precisely, but certain qualities seemed to crop up fairly often. The perception of insincerity, chiefly. Intellectual laziness, from someone my interlocutor believed that we can and should expect better of. Posturing. Ideology when it appeared to be deployed for craven professional, financial or sexual advantage.

There seemed to be some overlap with Dunning-Kruger syndrome, but not entirely so – it is broadly acknowledged that some people just can’t help being dumb, and while they may not be aware that they are dumb, this in itself doesn’t necessarily make them Bullshit. In other people, however, the behavior that constitutes reasonable ground for a Dunning-Kruger diagnosis is 100% the same thing that makes them Bullshit.

Note, too, that the quality of being Bullshit is something that mostly seems to reside at the professional or vocational level. Very importantly, there doesn’t seem to be anything preventing you from liking or enjoying the company of someone you believe to be Bullshit. Indeed, among the friends I talked to, some of their nominations were folks I know full well that they remained greatly fond of. These weren’t bad people. They were just Bullshit.

Of course the most interesting thing you could do with a Master Bullshit Matrix would be using it to discover who believes that you yourself are Bullshit. You could avoid wasting your time with those people; if you were particularly brave, you could even open up the question of your possible Bullshitness with them, and take steps to address the grounds for their belief, if any. Again, as I imagined it, anyway, the Master Bullshit Matrix would be a constructive tool for interpersonal growth and the avoidance of inadvertent offense, not a preteen’s nasty little cut-book. On this count I am probably being optimistic.

Is it possible to know that one is Bullshit? It’s hard to say. Perhaps, like the Dunning-Kruger effect itself, it’s a self-blinding condition: if you knew you had it, you wouldn’t have it. But it’s worth thinking about, isn’t it?

I got taken to task the other day regarding my preference for the jargony-seeming construction “commoning” over the more usual “commons.” (The specific wording: “You say you hate bullshit, but ‘commoning’ seems like just so much bafflegab to me.”)

This brilliant 2010 interview with key thinker/doers Massimo de Angelis and Stavros Stavrides ought to go some distance toward explaining that preference; it’s lost none of its luster with the intervening years, despite everything that’s happened in the world over that period.

In the effort to define a space for living that is neither market nor state, De Angelis and Stavrides make it clear that the act of seizing and occupying it is the easy part. All the glamor and all the grandeur attend that first nervy moment when wirecutters meet chainlink. But precisely who gets saddled with the obligation of continuously remaking that space? Who’s left with the physical work of maintenance, the emotional labor of negotiation? It’s a process, not a reified thing, and that in turn seems to demand the gerund form, with its implication that this is something unfolding in time: commoning.

At the moment, I’m neck-deep in my Verso stablemates Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s still-newish book Inventing the Future; things remaining more or less stable schedulewise, I’ll most likely finish it later on today, or tomorrow at the latest.

It’s a strange book, Inventing. You may have caught some of the buzz around it, and that buzz exists for good reason. (It’s not just the superspiffy totebags Verso had ginned up for it, though I’m sure those do not hurt one whit.) At its heart a passionate argument against work and for an end to neoliberalism and its reality control — forged along the same rough lines as those Paul Mason and the Fully Automated Luxury Communism kids are currently touting — Inventing is a genuinely curious mixture of crystal-clear analysis, righteous provocation and infuriating naivety. If you’re even remotely interested in what emergent technologies like machine learning and digital fabrication might imply for our capacity for collective action, and especially if you think of yourself as belonging to the horizontalist left, you should by all means pick it up, read it for yourself and form your own judgments. (Here’s Ken Wark’s take on it; I endorse most of his thoughts, and have a great deal of my own to add, which I’ll do in the form of my own forthcoming book.)

Late in the book there’s a passage concerning the stance Srnicek and Williams feel the postcapitalist left needs to adopt toward the mainstream media: if the “counter-hegemonic” project they describe is to have any hope of success, they argue, “it will require an injection of radical ideas into the mainstream, and not just the building of increasingly fragmented audiences outside it.”

Well. It must be said that this is not one of the book’s high points. In its latent suggestion that the only reason Thomas Piketty and Donna Haraway aren’t cohosting a lively, popular Sunday-morning gabfest on NBC right this very moment is because we, the progressive public, are somehow not trying hard enough, or have failed to sufficiently wrap our pointy heads around the awesome conditioning power of the mass media, in fact, it’s somewhere between irritating and ridiculous. (It’s hard for me to see how Srnicek and Williams’s argument here is substantively any different from that stroke of market-savvy inspiration the beloved but famously marginal Minutemen skewered on the cover of their second-to-last album. And now you know where the title of this post came from.)

Nevertheless, they’re onto something. Though that more-than-faintly patronizing tone never quite dissipates, S&W eventually find themselves on far firmer ground when they argue that “[l]eftist media organizations should not shy away from being approachable and entertaining, gleaning insights from the success of popular websites.” I was able to shake off the momentary harrowing vision I had of Leninist Buzzfeed, and press on through to what I take to be their deeper point: radical thought can actually resonate broadly when care is taken to craft the language in which that thought is expressed, and still more so when insular, self-congratulatory obscurity is avoided in the design of its containers. I endorse this notion wholeheartedly. This recent appreciation of Jacobin hits many of the same notes; whatever you think of Jacobin‘s politics, it’s hard to deny that its publishers consistently put together a sprightly, good-looking read. (I’d call it “the Monocle of the left,” but that would be to imply that Monocle‘s content is far more compelling than in fact it is.)

You might still argue that S&W ought to spend a little more time with McLuhan. My own feeling is that there’s more to distrust about the “mainstream media” than merely its overtly political content — that consuming information in the form of tweets, listicles, Safety Check notifications, screens overloaded with crawlers, and possibly even glowing rectangles themselves is hard to square with the kind of awareness I at least find it necessary to cultivate if I’m to understand anything at all about the way the systems in which I’m embedded work.

But ultimately, these are quibbles. I agree with S&W when they argue that overthrowing the weaponized “common sense” of the neoliberal era is an explicitly counter-hegemonic project; that developing a functioning counter-hegemony is something that requires longterm commitment; and that those with truly radical programs need to reconsider the relationship between “pop,” “popular” and “popularity” if that whole hearts-and-minds thing is ever going to work out for them. (I’m honor-bound to point out that Saul Alinsky said as much fifty years ago, but perhaps that too is a quibble.) So: no. I have no problem at all with presenting complex and potentially challenging ideas accessibly, so long as they can be rendered accessible without dumbing them down. If successful counter-hegemonic media looks a whole lot more like a Beyoncé video than some preciously anti-aesthetic art installation, so much the better. Bring on the hit songs.

We can surely read the various technologies of the quantified self as tending to “ensure that people continue to act and dream without any form of connectedness and coordination with others” (Stavrides), and this quick, cogent piece will only reinforce that sense.

Now, I can imagine a world — just barely, but it can be done — in which the capture of biometric measurements by a network with qualities of ubiquity and persistence was somehow not invidious. I can even imagine a world in which that capture resulted in better collective outcomes, physically, psychically and socially. But in our world, the one we actually live in, I think the very best we can possibly hope for from these technologies is positive-sum competition, a state in which each of our individual outcomes only improve for the fact that we are set against each other.

My bottom line is this: Though I’d be happy to be proven wrong, given everything I know and everything I’ve seen it is very, very difficult for me to imagine socially progressive uses of quantified-self technologies that do not simultaneously generate these easily foreseeable, sharply negative consequences. It may be my own limitations speaking, but I can’t see how things could possibly break any other way. In this world, anyway.

Twenty-five years ago, just after the outbreak of the first Gulf War, I moved into an anarchist co-op in the Upper Haight. (If you know the neighborhood at all well, you’ve almost certainly stood beneath my room: the bay window jutting directly above the ATM on Belvedere Street, at the time and for many years thereafter the only one for over a mile in any direction.) Though its every fiber was saturated with the sad pong of sexually deprived male bitterhippies in early middle age, the flat nevertheless (/therefore?) boasted one of the most impressive specialist libraries I’ve ever encountered.

No doubt because many of the flat’s residents had historically been associated with the Haight’s anarchist bookstore, Bound Together, its shelves had over the years accumulated hundreds of rare and unusual books on squatting, DIY technique, self-housing, revolutionary syndicalism, the politics of everyday life and so on. Among these was a curious 1976 volume called Radical Technology. Something between a British Whole Earth Catalog and an urban Foxfire book, Radical Technology presented its readers with a comprehensive and detailed blueprint for self-reliant, off-the-grid living.

Each of the book’s sections was fronted by an elaborate illustration depicting what typical British spatial arrangements — terraced housing, allotments, council estates, parish churches — might look like after they’d been reclaimed by autonomist collectives, in some not too terribly distant future. Unlike some of the more heroic imaginaries that were floating around in that immediate pre-Web epoch, you could readily imagine yourself living in their simple everydayness, making a life in the communal kitchen and sauna and printmaking workshop they depicted. From the material-economic perspective of someone residing in a shabby flat in the Upper Haight circa 1991, struggling to eke out a living as the city’s worst and clumsiest bike messenger, it would clearly be a good life, too: austere, perhaps, in some ways, but fulfilling and even generous in every register that really counts. (To be sure, this was a sense the illustrations shared with contemporary real-world outcroppings of late hippie technology in both its particularly British and its Bay Area variants, and I’d seen traces of it crop up in squats and urban homesteads back East, wherever someone resident had been infected by the Whole Earth/Shelter/Pattern Language ethos.)

I clean forgot about Radical Technology for a quarter century, but I never did forget those drawings. I had no way of reconsidering them, though, let alone pointing anybody else at them, until the other day, when Nick Durrant recognized my vague handwavings for what they were: a description of the “Visions” series anarchist illustrator Clifford Harper contributed to the mid-70’s British journal Undercurrents. (These issues of Undercurrents were subsequently anthologized as the book I’d come across; here’s scans of Harper’s entire series.) I had to smile when I read the account of “Visions” on Harper’s Wikipedia entry, as it could not possibly have been more on the nose:

These were highly detailed and precise illustrations showing scenes of post-revolutionary self-sufficiency, autonomy and alternative technology in urban and rural settings, becoming almost de rigueur on the kitchen wall of any self-respecting radical’s commune, squat or bedsit during the 1970s.

My memory of Harper’s “Visions” returned with such force not because I’d suddenly developed nostalgia for the lifeways of alternative San Francisco in the first ripples of its death spiral — though those house-feedingly enormous vegetarian stir-fries sure were tasty — but because the way of doing and being they imagined seems relevant again, and possibly more broadly so than ever before.

Something is clearly in the air. The combination of distributed, renewable microgrid power with digital fabrication, against a backdrop of networked organization, urban occupation and direct action, seems to be catalyzing into a coherent, shared conception of a way forward from the mire we find ourselves in. Similar notions crop up in Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism, in Jeremy Rifkin’s The Zero Marginal Cost Society (the particular naivety of which I’ll have more to say about in short order), in Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future, and the same convergence of possibilities animated my own first pass at articulating such a conception, a lashed-up framework I rather cheekily called the “minimum viable utopia.”

These conceptions of the possible are all pretty exciting, at least to those of us who share a certain cast of mind. What they’re all missing, though, to a one, is a Cliff Harper: someone to illustrate them, to populate them with recognizable characters, to make them vivid and real. We need them to feel real, so when we print them out and hang them on the walls of flats where the rent is Too Damn High and the pinboard surfaces of the cubicles where we grind away the mindless hours, we remember what it is we’re working so hard to bring into being.

At the very least, we need them so that those who follow us a quarter century from now understand that they too belong to a lineage of thought, belief and action, just as anyone who’s ever been inspired in their work by the Harper illustrations does. Some days, just knowing that line through time exists is enough to get you through the day.

Two of these projects involve the deployment of digital design and production techniques to create platforms for small-group conviviality, nestled inside larger spaces generally associated with high culture and the flows of capital that support it. The other two involve the use of low-end, commodity material to create platforms for face-to-face deliberation and the practice of democracy (as well as conviviality), deployed in marginal, interstitial or outright occupied spaces.

The appearance of a parallel evolution in these admittedly cherry-picked examples may say more about my wishful thinking than anything else. But it seems to me that there’s clearly something going on here, in the convergence of sophisticated digital design, on-site fabrication and software for the near-real-time user configuration of space in what we might call lightweight placemaking. In all of these projects, we see an emphasis on rapid mountability and demountability, and the mobility and highly sensitive user control they afford. We see high technique brought to bear on utterly commodified, widely available, broadly affordable (even free) materials. And we see these things used to bring people together, both to enjoy one another’s company and to discuss such matters of concern as arise before them.

There’s an especially lovely symbolism to the use of such humble materials in making the place of democracy, and if the use of commodity lumber doesn’t involve quite the same material rhetoric as the use of marble in the ennobling public spaces of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, well, neither is the public being invoked the same.

— SEE ALSO: Francis Cape’s We Sit Together, a history of the wooden bench in the American intentional-community tradition. Image courtesy Murray Guy Gallery.

The following is a short but rather chewy interview with me, conducted by Karol Piekarski for Medialab Katowice. I hope you enjoy it.

KP: It seems you’ve become quite pessimistic about the prospects of the public in the networked society (your weekly Dispatch, number 27), pointing out to the fact that for some reason we are not so willing to use creatively available data processing technologies. What if we look at this problem from a broader perspective? It took hundreds years for the basic literacy (writing and reading) to spread around the society. Although we may feel that invention of the World Wide Web was ages ago, in fact it’s just a beginning of the “new medium.” Maybe we “simply” need time to learn how to use, as a society, digital technologies?

AG: Well, I think we need to consider how rapidly we as consumers and users of technical systems can develop the critical literacy you’re talking about, versus the headway that those who are not concerned with such matters can make in the meantime.

I don’t even mean necessarily that the designers of emerging interactive products and services are consciously acting out of any set of values I might disagree with. I simply mean that portable, modular code can be recombined by some third party into really pernicious systems, readily and rapidly, either out of ignorance or what I would regard as malicious intent. By the time we figure out how to use these systems wisely, or come to a collective determination that we reject their use, the damage will have been done.

And even that’s assuming that we are more or less static, as subjects and users. The truth is that we are acted on by these technologies, as individuals and as societies both.

So the relative power of a particular kind of personality type or learning style may come into the ascendance, and reinforce the conditions of its own vitality, while making it very difficult for anyone else to even sustain themselves. For example, introverts have never had it easy, but now, in our world of continuous mandatory self-performance, they run the risk of being more marginalized and overlooked than ever. We know that success under the new dispensation requires more than the occasional schmoozing that might have seen you through in the past. It requires not merely that you make yourself continuously available, not merely that you have the energy — the psychic and the financial wherewithal — to socialize and network, but that you are seen to socialize and network and to be the kind of person who enjoys doing so. And that’s in large part a consequence of the way we’ve chosen to integrate always-on social networking technologies into our everyday lives.

You could argue, with some justice, that the world has always selected for some personality types over others — that there’s nothing fundamentally new here, it’s just that the place where our culture has decided the grandeur ought to live is shifting. But I’ve always thought that the point of our work was to imagine futures that were more just and equitable, not merely a new and different unequal distribution of power.

KP: Smart cities vs. smart citizens, government or corporation vs. people – we still tend to build these clear oppositions. Do you think that juxtaposing “centralized” against “distributed” can really help explain the mechanisms of power in the networked society? Or maybe we need a bit more sophisticated approach to understand what is actually going on (thinking here about the “society of control” or the work of Alexander Galloway)?

AG: It strikes me that there are a few different concerns bundled up in this question, and that we might benefit from unpacking them and considering them separately.

First, there’s the question of what we mean when we refer to something as a network. The dominant political tenor of the early mass Internet was a kind of structural determinism we associate with folks like John Perry Barlow. The idea was that the network principle of structuration itself, as supposedly immanent in the distributed topology of the World Wide Web, wasn’t merely inherently morally superior to organizational schemes based on hierarchy and coercion, but was practically superior, too. It would therefore “naturally” underwrite a spontaneous mass restructuring of society along horizontal or rhizomatic lines.

We know now, of course, that that didn’t happen, and it’s reasonable to ask why that is. Alex’s great contribution, in Protocol, was to remind us that the Internet as we know it has never been anything but a monstrous hybrid. Its functioning depends on the interaction of two very different ways of organizing the transmission and reception of information: a highly centralized and hierarchical addressing scheme called the Domain Name System, and a radically distributed messaging protocol we call TCP/IP. Only one of these “routes around failure” in the rhizomatic way so beloved of the early net theorists, while the other remains radically vulnerable to (say) State efforts to interdict the free flow of information. So, far from spontaneously giving rise to some antiauthoritarian, horizontalist utopia, while it’s fair to say that the Internet does tend to destabilize certain existing power relations, just as often it reproduces the selfsame dynamics of power that existed beforehand.

And that leads to our closely-related second question, which is how we should consider the relationship between structure and agency. The fundamental mistake that network determinists very often make is to treat people like Internet switches, or the consensing bees Thomas Seeley depicts so beautifully in his book Honeybee Democracy. They assume that, given a certain topology of organization and the logics of informational flow that attend it, certain macro-scale political outcomes will necessarily follow.

I think there is a broadly observable trend toward networked structures showing up in places we might not historically have expected them to — in the large-scale capitalist commercial enterprise, for example. But just because an organization’s practical, day-to-day decision-making is nominally organized horizontally doesn’t mean the workers who use it on the job carry that logic into the other spheres of their life. And it certainly doesn’t mean that those workers can’t be fired just like people who work for more consciously and avowedly hierarchical organizations. Ask all the liberated, Holocratic non-managers Tony Hsieh just let go from Zappos where they think power lies.

Finally, there’s the question of how we model the relationship between openness and power. We know by now that it’s a terrible error to assume that there’s a necessary connection between radical openness and a liberatory or emancipatory politics. If anything, you could be forgiven for concluding just the opposite: that there’s been a fair amount of what Marcuse would call repressive desublimation, Gamergate being the preeminent case in point.

In fact, we have to ask if openness and mobility and the apparent freedom to act aren’t qualities that can easily be leveraged by parties acting in ways that are contrary to our own understanding of our interests. This is what I take Deleuze to be arguing in the “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” and it’s at the heart of governmentality theory.

So if neither distributed organizational topologies nor horizontal decision-making nor radical transparency and openness necessarily buy you equity and justice, it’s appropriate to ask: what would? And the only answer I have is that you have to fight directly for equity and for justice. You have to believe in and want those things first, and the tools that support them will follow, will be discovered or invented. But you can’t first build the tool and suppose that progressive values and organizing logics will flow outward from it — certainly not in any straightforward or uncomplicated way.

I should point out that this is something I’ve had to learn the hard way my ownself.

KP: Living in a globalised world, we tend to universalise the discourse around digital technologies, especially their relationship to society. It’s visible in your work that you try to put more attention to those less privileged in order to figure out whether any of our networked/digital solutions could actually make their life better. Poland is an interesting example: behind the western world, but way ahead the most economically deprived countries. You’ve spent some time in Poland recently, if you were to advise Polish government, universities or companies, what you would suggest to spend the money on in terms of innovation and development?

AG: I guess I would start by asking what ends and goals you’re trying to work toward. You know I completely reject the point of view that says Poland or anyone else necessarily needs to do what everyone else is doing, needs to accept anyone else’s definitions of “advanced” or “innovative” or “highly developed.”

It’s a phrase which has sadly taken on a fairly bourgeois coloration, but I still think there’s something to be said for “quality of life.” And I don’t think there’s any inherent correlation — and I should be very clear: neither a direct nor an inverse correlation — between economic development in the abstract and quality of life. Tokyo is certainly one of the safest, most “advanced,” most efficient and highly-developed cities on the planet, but the regnant xenophobia and gender politics you find there make it a place I can’t imagine wanting to return to, except as a visitor. The “quality of life” there mostly resolves to a continually refined, absolutely state-of-the-art consumerism. By contrast, most everyone can think of places that are maybe a little run-down, maybe even a little sketchy at times, but where more of your time is your own, you aren’t quite as hemmed in by the pressures of conforming to some model of appearance and self-presentation, and in general life is more spacious. So the first part of my advice to Poles would be to weigh with the most exceeding care what already works about the way you live, and not be in any particular hurry to overwrite it with modes of being someone living a million miles away who’s never once set foot in your culture assures you is the new hotness.

The flipside of this, of course, is not clinging to things that clearly aren’t working, just because they’re the ways in which things have always been done. Racism, sexism and homophobia — like ageism and ableism and hierarchical orderings in general — sure are traditional, just about everywhere. But that doesn’t for one hot second mean I think they’re worth respecting and holding onto. And this goes for organizational and technical matters as well. The bottom line is that you’ve got to keep your eye firmly fixed on what kind of frame for living you’re trying to bring into being, and absolutely refuse to let yourself get distracted, whether by notional hipness and the fetishism of emergent technology, or by appeals to stability and tradition for their own sake.